By Roger Kimball; Roger Kimball is a frequent contributor to The New Criterion and other journals.

Published: August 4, 1985

THE 27 interviews collected in this volume span the length of Walker Percy's literary career from the publication of his novel ''The Moviegoer'' in 1961 through the publication of his second work of nonfiction, ''Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book,'' which appeared in 1983. Taken together, they provide us with something of an inventory of Mr. Percy's intellectual and artistic preoccupations over the last two decades and acquaint us with the character and the life of the man behind the works.

Indeed, by the time one finishes ''Conversations With Walker Percy,'' one can expect to know the highlights of the writer's life by heart. We read in several of the interviews that his father committed suicide when he was 13; that he and his two brothers were adopted by his father's cousin, the author William Alexander Percy, when their mother died in an automobile accident a few years later; and that Walker Percy and his wife converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1940's. And we are again and again reminded that Mr. Percy studied medicine at Columbia University, that he contracted tuberculosis while performing an autopsy during his internship at Bellevue Hospital and that he discovered his vocation as a writer while reading existential literature during his two years of convalescence.

But in addition to rehearsing these standard biographical items, many of the interviews touch on a wide range of literary, social and even philosophical topics. This of course is to be expected. Mr. Percy is generally considered one of our premier ''philosophical'' novelists. Writing for him is not merely a sophisticated form of entertainment; it is an ''exploration of reality,'' a ''serious business in which the novelist is out both to give joy and to draw blood.'' In fact, Mr. Percy began his literary career writing philosophical essays, not novels. Only in the late 50's did he begin to write fiction, in part to reach a larger audience but also, he explains, because ''I was tired of getting paid in reprints.''

Mr. Percy's main philosophical interests are in Kierkegaard and the existential tradition that he helped to inaugurate, and in the philosophy of language that stems from the late Susanne Langer's work on symbols. These two influences are abundantly represented in the interviews. Both Marcus Smith and Jo Gulledge, for example, talk to Mr. Percy about his work in semiotics, and Bradley R. Dewey's annotated conversation with him about Kierkegaard goes into considerable detail about his use of Kierkegaardian themes in his novels.

The last piece in the book, a brief interview that deals with Thomas Merton, promised to be of special interest. The two had corresponded since the early 60's, when Merton wrote Mr. Percy an admiring letter about ''The Moviegoer,'' but met only once, at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, a year or two before Merton's death in 1968. According to Mr. Percy, however, when they finally met, they felt ''uneasy'' around each other and their conversation never really got off the ground: ''It's amazing how little we found to talk about.''

Mr. Percy's chief concern as a novelist is with ''the dislocation of man in the modern age,'' with the sense of ennui and meaninglessness that has shadowed so many lives, even - or perhaps especially - in the midst of affluence. ''The thing that fascinates me,'' he tells one interviewer, ''is the fact that men can be well-off, judging by their own criteria, with all their needs satisfied, goals achieved, et cetera, yet as time goes on, life is almost unbearable. Amazing!'' Thus in his first and most celebrated work, ''The Moviegoer'' (which won the National Book Award in 1962), we find the bemused protagonist, Binx Bolling, engaged in ''the search'': an amorphous, yet desperate, struggle to escape from the emptiness that suffuses his quiet, everyday life in a New Orleans suburb.

The pieces collected here vary widely in quality. Some are earnest, thoughtful interviews that attempt to extend our knowledge of Mr. Percy's art, influences and significance; but a good number are hardly more than chatty bagatelles - glib, occasional products meant primarily to boost his most recent book. Over all, I believe, ''Conversations With Walker Percy'' can be said to make a contribution to the literature on him. But the reader should be warned that the interviews are presented completely unabridged. The editors acknowledge that this entails what they regard as ''some slight repetition,'' but they insist that ''the cumulative picture will prove to be of value to scholars.'' I had to wonder about this. Surely most readers, who are primarily interested in Mr. Percy as a novelist, will be impatient with so much repetition. And scholars? How many times do scholars have to accompany interviewers on a trip to this writer's home in Covington, La.? How many picturesque descriptions of Mr. Percy's picturesque, chateau-style house do they need? And how many glasses of iced tea must they sit through? There is a lot of iced tea in this book.

And if tedium is one problem with the editors' decision to leave the interviews unabridged and unedited, inconsistency among the pieces is another. The reader might well ask: Where was Mr. Percy's first philosophical essay published? In what year did he convert to Catholicism? How long was he in analysis? There are conflicting accounts of these and other matters, and one would expect a volume published with scholars in mind would provide the appropriate clarifying annotations.

In the end, perhaps the most illuminating piece in the book is the interview that the writer conducted with himself in 1977:

''Question: Will you consent to an interview? ''Answer: No. ''Q: Why not?

''A: Interviewers always ask the same questions, such as: What time of day do you write? Do you type or write longhand? What do you think of the South? What do you think of the New South? What do you think of southern writers? . . . Please don't ask me about Dostoevski and Kierkegaard.''